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This week the Association for Computer Machinery (ACM) announced its 2016 fellows, which include four principal investigators from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL): professors Erik Demaine, Fredo Durand, William Freeman, and Daniel Jackson. They were among the 1 percent of ACM members to receive the distinction.

“Erik, Fredo, Bill, and Daniel are wonderful colleagues and extraordinary computer scientists, and I am so happy to see their contributions recognized with the most prestigious member grade of the ACM,” says CSAIL Director Daniela Rus, who herself was named a fellow last year. “All of us at CSAIL are very proud of these researchers for receiving these esteemed honors.”

“As nearly 100,000 computing professionals are members of our association, to be selected to join the top 1 percent is truly an honor,” says ACM President Vicki L. Hanson. “Fellows are chosen by their peers and hail from leading universities, corporations and research labs throughout the world. Their inspiration, insights and dedication bring immeasurable benefits that improve lives and help drive the global economy. ”

Demaine was selected for contributions to geometric computing, data structures, and graph algorithms. His research interests include the geometry of understanding how proteins fold and the computational difficulty of playing games. He received the MacArthur Fellowship for his work in computational geometry. He and his father Martin Demaine have produced numerous curved-crease sculptures that explore the intersection of science and art — and that are currently in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

A Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) professor whose research spans video graphics and photo-generation, Durand was selected for contributions to computational photography and computer graphics rendering. He also works to develop new algorithms to enable image enhancements and improved scene understanding. He received the ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award in 2016.

Freeman is the Thomas and Gerd Perkins Professor of EECS at MIT. He was selected as a fellow for his contributions to computer vision, machine learning, and computer graphics. His research interests also include Bayesian models of visual perception and computational photography. He received “Outstanding Paper” awards at computer vision and machine learning conferences in 1997, 2006, 2009 and 2012, as well as ACM’s “Test of Time” awards for papers from 1990 and 1995.

Jackson is an EECS professor and associate director of CSAIL whose work has focused on improving the functionality and dependability of software through lightweight formal methods. He was selected by ACM for contributions to software modeling and the creation of Alloy, a modeling language that has been used to find flaws in many designs and protocols. He is a MacVicar Fellow and also received this year's ACM SIGSOFT Impact Paper Award.

ACM will formally recognize the fellows at its annual awards banquet in San Francisco in late June 2017.